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Comment by spaghettiandm | Hacker News Reader

>-"Mozilla is run by a bunch of SJW idiots because they ran their CEO off. So now I run Brave." (I had to look into this, as I wasn't paying attention at the time. They picked a new CEO who cared so passionately about removing the right of gay people to get married he even donated his own money to the cause. That was a dumb hill to die on. Now he's an anti-masker who actually runs Brave.)

It wasn't a hill to die on, it was a private donation from his private bank account as a private person. The funding page got leaked and people saw that he donated. And it wasn't removing the right for gays to marry, it was to keep the proposal from becoming a law. You might not realize that some people hold very strong religious beliefs about marriage, something the vast majority of Americans historically had, and for this reason gays previously generally only had something called a civil union prior to 2015.

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There are a lot of Mozilla developers and users that are directly harmed by legislation like this or are close to people that are directly harmed. “You might not realize” that these people also hold very strong beliefs about this.

He displayed extremely poor judgement. The fact that it was a personal donation does not exempt him from accountability.

Why is donating to a cause you believe in extremely poor judgement?

> “You might not realize”

The tone of my post wasn't the friendliest it could have been I agree, but I get really annoyed when people imply that those who believe that marriage is between a man and a woman, which from a Christian perspective is very clear, are evil.

I think, the point where this logic misses is when somebody, with such christian belief, actively goes out and tries to vilify and fight against those who get married in a way that they disagree with.

It's completely fair that people who do not subscribe to Christianity would look negatively upon those who do and who are trying to force their belief systems on everybody else.

And it's arbitrary, anyway. How many passages from the Bible are nonchalantly dismissed by contemporary Christians because they're barbaric or otherwise incompatible with modern society and Christianity? If you have to pick and choose your beliefs anyway, why should any respect be owed to those who choose to believe that gays have no right to marry?

I have no opinion on whether they are “evil”, but they certainly are causing actual harm to actual people. Religion is not a license to avoid accountability of this fact.

It's fine to have religious beliefs. No one was forcing churches to perform gay marriages, so there was no reason to get the state constitution involved. There was no real reason to support Prop 8 unless your goal was to "lessen the status and dignity of gays and lesbians, and classify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples."[1]

It was 2008. He was asked to run Mozilla, not Focus on the Family. It was an exceedingly dumb hill to die on.

[1]https://www.scribd.com/document/80680002/10-16696-398-Decisi...

And a point which doesn't get brought up often is that he was somewhat controversial before any of that came out. There were multiple resignations from the board when he was picked as CEO.

You mean the same board that appointed him? This whole "the board all resigned because they were so upset about their own appointment" narrative is mostly nonsense.

AIUI (I was an employee at the time), there was one resignation because of that. The rest were already planned.

"You might not realize that some people hold very strong religious beliefs about marriage..."

Fuck 'em.

The fact that problematic beliefs are widely held does not forgive past sins, especially when they were known as sins at the time, and ESPECIALLY when you talk about leadership.

> And it wasn't removing the right for gays to marry, it was to keep the proposal from becoming a law.

Additionally, it is not about the right to marry, it is about marriage as an institution and what is meant with it. Everyone had equal rights to marry also before, it is just that gays do not want to marry somone from the opposite sex.

"Everyone has the same access to marriage, interracial couples just don't want to marry someone of the same skin color."

No it's about the right for gays to access a legal secular institution. Civil unions do not confer all the rights and privileges of marriage. One of the possible resolutions to gay marriage was to make the legal institution for everyone called a civil-union but that proposal died almost immediately in the mid 2000s.

I sort of thought we had had this discussion already. Gay people don’t have heterosexual relationships in the same way a straight person does, yes they are free to marry, but not in the way they’d actually want to. Also the very best you can get to about marriage as a traditional even religious institution is maybe the government shouldn’t be running it. Thinking otherwise isn’t just an opinion a bit out of the mainstream anymore at least among the class that works for tech companies. Can you imagine if he’d donated to a cause that was against inter racial marriages?

> Can you imagine if he’d donated to a cause that was against inter racial marriages?

That is not the same thing and is far from the point I am making. It would be the same thing if he argued, "gay people can't marry, period". But an argument that "marriage is a life long commitment between a man and a woman" is something different. Not about gay people, it is about marriage as an institution with a special status.

Note, I am not entering this discussion to argue what is right or wrong. But I think it is an entirely valid opinion to have, and not something to be cancelled for.

But the point I'm making is that being against interracial marriage, even if it were somehow just about something like marriage is definitionally not interracial would rightly be considered cancelable to most people. The reason I think that the examples seem different is merely that their badness seems different to you. There isn't some set of things that are clearly ok to sanction someone over and some set that aren't. It's all merely about how clearcut you think the issue is and that will always be political.

To be clear though I do think this is a clear cut issue. Not to get into the weeds on it, but I do think your options are either believing that marriage should not be a function of government at all, or believing that marriage between two same sex people should be allowed

> Everyone had equal rights to marry also before...

Well that's just not true.

It is true. It is just that who they wanted to marry was not whom they had the right to marry. A gay man had the right to marry a woman just as much as a straight man had.

>It is just that who they wanted to marry was not whom they had the right to marry.

Which inherently makes it an unequal right.

No it is equal. Everyone can marry according to the definition of what a marriage is (was). It is just that some people have preferences that don't align with that. But it is no different than if someone polygamous want to marry several women. Their preference don't align with what marriage is defined as, but they have exactly the same rights.

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